It happens in politics, it happens in families, it happens in the workplace, so -- of course -- it happens at the bar: people who were once close turn on each other. And, like in all of those places, it makes the people close to them uncomfortable. Uncomfortable with easy access to an alcoholic beverage, yes, but still: uncomfortable. Sometimes it is politics, sometimes a sense of betrayal. Sometimes a principle, sometimes unrequited love. Some causes seem rational, some seem silly, but that doesn't really matter. If the people involved are taking it that seriously, then the needle is in the red. And the needle stays in the red, because no mechanic wants to take on that shit. A lot of people think that, somehow, the bartender can fix these things. Because bartenders are Magic. They turn your money into alcohol, which is always a good trick. But unless one of the Red Needle People is a lousy customer, then there is not much he or she can do: the bartender is paid to serve c...

A few years back there was a kid on the Ave that I called the Dylan Kid. He dressed in vintage clothes to wear things that look like Bob Dylan might've worn, back in the day. He had the electric howl of hair, only red. And the sunglasses. And the aloof pose: he obviously studied hard at studied cool. Like Madonna and the British accent she sometimes has. He would play his acoustic guitar a few storefronts down from the bar, and sing his songs, songs that sounded like Dylan songs from back in the day. Back in the day was back again, at least for him. I remember him being pretty good, if not particularly original. But then they said that about Dylan too, early on. For awhile the Music Industry kept trying to find the New Bob Dylan: Bruce Springsteen was one of those so anointed. By the New Dylan they meant pretty much the Young Dylan, or at least up to, then stopping, at That Christian Thing.  Maybe there were a lot of New Dylans that were doing That Christian Thing, and...

At the bar there is a younger guy who fancies himself a poet. Now, he doesn't call himself a poet -- it sounds presumptive and pretentious to describe one's self that way, most likely --but he says he writes poems. I guess not all who plumb are plumbers, I don't know. He sits in a booth with a beer and writes in his notebook, scribbles things out, writes again. Sometimes he appears mildly anguished, which I can imagine poets looking like: there is a word, the perfect word, but it just won't come to mind.  Words can be tricky: they have different associations for different people, and you may be trying to play off of the different associations to achieve a deeper meaning. Or perhaps you're just trying to find the best word that conceivably rhymes. It probably sucks when you start with what you consider the perfect word, but then no other good word rhymes with it. Maybe Cole Porter already used up all of the good rhymes. And he wasn't even a poet. But...

One of the nice things about the Ave during the Holidays: it doesn't change all that much. It's cold, so the Heroin Kids aren't out as much, which is nice. Still, if you are on the street having a cigarette you will still be asked for spare cigarettes or paper money, just like always. The Ragged Crazies are still there; their mumbled spiels and shouted non sequitirs usually don't involve anything about Christmas -- the voices in their heads are on their own calendar, which might have a thousand days, or maybe only one. One of the things that doesn't change much: shoppers. Not a lot of people go Christmas shopping on the Ave. The malls and downtown and University Village are jammed like a Tokyo subway train, but the Ave is not really a shopping destination. Unless you buy your Christmas gifts at the drug store. Or Seven-Eleven. Or the Retro Gaming shop. The University Bookstore gets crowded -- books and UW sweatshirts are easy gifts -- but otherwise, well: t...

Television has a way of finding you. It is typically in your home, of course. The remote control is on your bed-stand, perhaps. It is in the airport, it is in the hospital waiting room, it is in the waiting room of the auto repair shop while you are getting your twenty-thousand-mile service. That car was new, once; now it is just your car. Television and waiting go together. And it is at the bar. It is on when there are sports, obviously. But when the game is over it usually stays on, muted, because: jukebox. When the game is on a local station what follows is some off-brand show that the local stations buy to put on after games to fill air. A lot of shows about animals. People drink their drinks, look at the animals. The off-brand animal show makers should probably just put on cat videos from the internet: perfect for watching with the sound off. Drinking alcohol and watching cats act like jerks; it is a pleasant combination. During the weekday afternoons, before the deluge o...

The jukebox at the bar: sometimes it plays music, sometimes it functions as a nostalgia machine. These overlap, of course: but sometimes music is played for the ear, and sometimes it is played for the memory. Different ages play different nostalgia. Some of the younger kids will completely ignore the jukebox when some late fifties song comes on, maybe put on their headphones; others will shake their heads when Jim Morrison croons. Because Jim Morrison croons on the jukebox a lot: I have mentioned before the Jim Morrison fan who dreams of Père Lachaise but usually goes to Hawaii. The Sixties is obvious Nostalgia; there is not as much love for The Forgotten Seventies, although Seals & Crofts' "Summer Breeze" does get played once in awhile. A hazy song for hazy memories, with those harmonies that change at the end to the new chords and become something that feels a little disquieting, a little foreboding. Something that feels a little disquieting, a little foreb...

In a previous story about the bar I mentioned Show Tune Tuesdays. It was pretty much what it sounds like: on Tuesday afternoons I would play three or four jukebox tracks from musicals. Singin' in the Rain. Oklahoma, maybe. Something from "The Music Man" perhaps, or "West Side Story." The bartender was not fond of Show Tune Tuesdays. Nor were a lot of the regulars, really. Which only made me like it more. Because I'm like that, sometimes. You hear a lot of the same songs on the jukebox, a lot of the same genres. For instance: Lord, please do not make me have to listen to George Thorogood ever again, thank you. Yes, you are Bad To The Bone: we get it. Blues, like the blues they play on a beer commercial where diverse hipsters play pool and laugh in a laughably gritty bar, played with the slide guitar equivalent of a warm Budweiser. And at least those commercials are only thirty seconds long: "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" is fucking eight m...

The older guys at the bar don't often play the jukebox; they remember when it took coins, not paper money. Every once in a while though, you'll see one punching in some selections, and some late-fifties or early-sixties music comes on; it is a welcome change of pace, and even some of the younger patrons find themselves bobbing their heads. One day a few years back an older gentleman played a nice selection. Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, a couple from Otis Redding. Then: Jim Croce, John Denver. Jim Croce and John Denver rarely get played at the bar -- they seem to now belong to The Forgotten Seventies. Maybe I'll go deeper into The Forgotten Seventies later, it is something I've been known to talk about from time to time. Anyway, I smiled at him, then went and played a song. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Not of the Forgotten Seventies, them: wherever there is a bar with a jukebox someone will eventually play "Free Bird". Because: America. Anyway, the older gentl...

There is an older guy at the bar -- yeah, yeah, there are more than one -- who you can tell was good-looking in the day, and he still walks with an easy cool you can't practice. Wise eyes that are somewhat sad. He was a musician, of course. Bass player back in the days of R&B that played with, well, an easy cool. His fathered managed a club in Seattle in the Fifties and Sixties, booked the music acts. A lot of the acts were the black blues musicians who toured relentlessly at the time, driving themselves from club to club across the country and back. Seattle would probably like to think they welcomed these black musicians back then, but -- sorry, Seattle -- the Coon Chicken Inn only closed in 1949. There was certainly a white audience for these players, but often the players would stay the night at the club manager's home: cheaper, simpler, less potential problems that way. The easy cool bass player was a young teen at the time, learning to play, and deeply in love...

There was a guy who, in essence, resigned himself from the bar over inappropriate sexual behavior. He was in his early sixties, but could pass for ten years younger: full head of hair that he wore in a manner maybe reminiscent of James Dean, and he hadn't gone to fat or stooping. Dressed casual but clean. Polite. He was mostly known for playing the same four or five songs on the jukebox. Slow dreary songs from the past. They obviously meant something deep to him, but for the ones who did not share his particular memories: slow and dreary. Eric Burdon & The Animals' "San Franciscan Nights" was a constant. I have now heard that song at least three dozen times -- a cautious estimate at that; I never, ever, need to hear it again. As I said: particular memories. Not everyone feels stare-into-space wistful over a particular 'warm San Franciscan night'. From fifty years ago. Or to hear about it in song three dozen times. He developed a crush on a particular p...

I have mentioned college girls who have been at the bar. This is because I am at the bar, college girls are sometimes at the bar, and sometimes I am there at the bar when the college girls are there. At the bar. But hopefully you have seen from my writings that it is not all about the college girls. I have also conversed with the parents of college girls. At the bar. A few months ago a college girl came into the bar with her parents. I think it was a Saturday, early afternoon. The parents were no doubt visiting their daughter, and she brought them to the bar to have lunch. I'm not sure what signal it sends the parents that their daughter is bringing them to the bar, but I leave it to them to understand their own dynamics. After lunch and a beer the mother and daughter leave. I assume they are going shopping. It is a thing I suspect mothers and daughters do. Maybe this is stereotypical thinking on my part; maybe they went to attend a rocket science seminar. I know I...

There is a retired black man who sits at the bar; sometimes drinks beer, sometimes drinks wine. He is a bit of a curmudgeon, and often he keeps to himself, his earphones on. Sometimes though, when his earphones are off, we talk. He has a great laugh, like an old car trying to start up on a cold morning.  He loves old progressive rock. I love some of it, too. One of my favorites was the German band 'Can'; he didn't know who they were. I played a track on the jukebox. He hated them. To be fair, I think everyone in the bar hated them. The track was, like, twenty minutes long. I realized quickly I made a mistake. But the song kept going. And going. And going. Oh yes: the singer can't really sing, either. So that makes it seem longer, too. So: he pretty much loves old British progressive rock, to be more specific. Even more, there is a unifying item that runs through the British progressive rock music he likes: the Mellotron. You have probably heard the Mellotro...

There is a guy at the bar, late fifties, a huge Jim Morrison fan. Huge. The Doors are the Alpha and Omega of art, of poetry, of music, of life. Except it isn't really the Doors, just Jim Morrison. Don't get him wrong: the other guys in the band were cool, they got to hang out with Jim Morrison. He has travelled a little; Hawaii, mostly. But his dream trip is Paris. He doesn't necessarily have an affinity for the city: he knows about the Eiffel Tower, sure. But what he really wants to do before he dies is go to Père Lachaise Cemetery, to see Morrison's grave. I told him I had been there years ago. The cemetery is beautiful in a melancholy way. But I wasn't that impressed with Morrison's grave: all the fans leave trinkets and scribble banal tributes on the monument. I seem to recall an empty bottle or two. He says that is exactly what he wants to do: indeed, he already knows precisely what he wants to write on Jim Morrison's monument. He has thoug...

A week or so ago I arrived at the bar to find a few of the regulars talking about the movie 'Pulp Fiction.' And it is a fun movie to talk about in a bar, although I haven't seen it in fifteen years or so. Maybe twenty. But I remember parts. You don't forget the gimp. The older black man says he just watched it again: he has a VHS copy. People tell him he should get a DVD or BluRay of it, but he says he has already bought it once, that's enough. Everyone agrees that Samuel L. Jackson is a bad-ass. Indeed: in the movie he does have a wallet that says 'Bad Mother Fucker', so that is added as proof, amongst other things. In the movie the hitman played by Jackson quotes the Bible, which everyone agrees is bad-ass. Which is funny, because most of them could care less about the Bible. Context, I guess. Because I can be an asshole, I agree that Jackson is bad-ass, but he is not the biggest bad-ass in the movie. What the hell am I talking about? is prett...

I mentioned previously that, in a roundabout way, the appearance of the Acid Kid caused 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' to be played on the jukebox. It really was a roundabout way, although -- in retrospect -- it pretty much just seems A to B. But back to the song: this brought forth a discussion amongst the regulars about a particular claim of trivia: did John Lennon really not intend the song title as a reference to LSD? The story is that his son Julian made a picture. When asked what the picture was of, he replied his schoolmate Lucy. And she was in the sky. With diamonds. John Lennon claimed he didn't notice the acronym formed by the major words. A lot of the argument at the bar can be boiled down to: of course he knew. Lennon took LSD. Lennon was clever. Lennon liked to tweak noses. Of those he believed needed their noses tweaked. Again: of course he knew. So I took the other argument. Because I like to do that. I pointed out that McCartney confirmed the p...

In a post yesterday I mentioned the band Loud Family. They had an album called "The Tape of Only Linda." This title is in reference... well, I'll let Wiki do the lifting:  "a reference to the notorious tape recording of a live performance of "Hey Jude" by Paul McCartney in which an engineer had isolated Linda McCartney's vocals." And the vocals are iffy: off-key, to begin. So, you know: a tape for the haters. On the internet some claim hoax, others swear to it. Meaning it is as real as you want it to be. Except Paul McCartney basically indicates it is true: "A BOOTLEG tape of the late Linda McCartney singing out of tune caused her so much hurt that Sir Paul McCartney has revealed that it was a prime reason for his latest project - a documentary on the history of his band Wings... But in an interview to be published in Mojo magazine later this week, Sir Paul says that a major motivation for the whole exercise was t...